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Ultraleftism: The chihuahua that thought it was a pitbull

Anyone who has labored on the far left will understand this immediately. Some wee little splinter group of a faction that broke from another group decades ago (and they still aren’t speaking to each other), decides the planet is waiting for it to issue a solidarity statement, generally about some cause most have never heard of. The more obscure the cause the better, because it means you’re authentic, unlike the rest of the fractious splitters.

Such missives, which are awaited by no one and read by even fewer, except for members of the group that wrote them, are invariably devoid of humor, wit, and are clueless that readers might like to be convinced of viewpoints rather than lectured to. Instead, there are endless paragraphs of dense prose referring to obscure communist theorists and their immense relevance to the current issue for those who possess the Proper Understanding. Again, the more obscure the references the better, as it shows your solidarity with the working class. “The struggle of Bogdanov and the Otozovists has direct relevance to the struggle of transgender socialist mine workers in Malawi today and their heroic strike against the bosses.”

The big problem with this is it’s an echo chamber for the very few, How many Marxists can dance on the head of a pin sort of thing. The US is currently in a massive resurgence of populism. And the far left is missing from it, probably because, like the establishment of both parties, it doesn’t understand populism either. So it’s missing a huge upswelling of precisely the sentiment it been waiting years for.

BOSTON – Local Trotskyist and PhD student Chris Milano managed to corner his classmate and Alinteri enthusiast Deniz Yildırım at a get-together at a local Boston bar this evening to inform him of the great theoretical and practical deficiencies of the Turkish left, as viewed from the vantage point of Milano’s experience as an organiser for the ISO.